An Objective Look at Star Wars - Ep. 1

Intro
While visiting my family over Christmas, I discovered a few of my little cousins, hereby known as Cat (17), Berri (15), and Valise (11), had never ever seen a Star Wars movie.  I resolved to rectify that.  As I reached for my dad's Episode IV DVD, I remembered something Lucas had done.  The general release DVDs had the special edition on them which included material from the prequels (*cough *cough, Hayden Christensen).  I would have to show them the whole series chronologically in order for it to make the most sense.  Kicking myself for not bringing my Limited Edition Theatrical Cut DVDs, I showed them the entire series, front to back.  It was difficult working around family activities and healthy outdoor activity, but we finally finished just six hours before they were scheduled to leave.  Here's what they thought.  

Episode I: What's the Name of This One Again?
I warned them before we even started that the first three were the bad ones that we just had to get through before we got to the original trilogy, and this film proved me right very quickly.  As we watched, I was asked to pause the movie every ten minutes or so to explain what was going on.  The film failed to properly ground them in the new and exotic universe and the story seemed to simply involve the characters dashing from one action sequence to the next.  Cat noticed very quickly how ineffective the battle droids were and seemed to get bored of them fighting the Jedi.  Scenes like the bongo trip and the pod race were more interesting to them.  Surprisingly (or not) Jar Jar got very few laughs, except out of my dad.  I didn't sense that they found him annoying, they just noticed that there wasn't much to him.  One thing I did to make the screening more interesting was to tell them that "The Queen" was played by Keira Knightly and "Padme" was played by Natalie Portman, leaving them to debate who was actually on screen at any given time.  Berri wasn't fooled and when the Queen revealed herself, she declared "I told you!" to everyone who believed me.  Throughout the film, I got several questions along the lines of, "What is the Force?  What exactly do the Jedi do?  What are Hutts?  Are they bad?"  Fair questions which are completely glossed over in this film and and aren't even touched upon until the Original Trilogy.  They were forced to take the mishmash of it in stride and put the confusion to the back of their minds.  I tried not to fill in too many gaps because I wanted to see how much information the film gave.

Final Thoughts
Their journey into the Star Wars universe almost ended right after starting.  Valise declared that "Star Wars is stupid" and only agreed to keep watching when my little sister, who had seen them all, talked her into it.  Berri astutely asked why "that guy with the beard" (i.e. Qui-Gon) was in the story so much when all he did was die at the end.  Why indeed?  It's been said before, but I say it again.  This film failed on all counts.  It failed to properly introduce new viewers to Star Wars, it failed to tell a good SW story (or a good regular story for that matter), and it failed to be an effective start to the prequel trilogy.  All in all, FAIL.

Next
Awkward dialogue and a lot of "Wait, what?"